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Professor Luca Turin has always been interested in how perfumes smell. But he鈥檚 also interested in how we smell perfumes. Because how we are able to experience smell is still unknown.

In the early 1980s, Professor Luca Turin caught a whiff of the Shiseido fragrance Nombre Noir in a department store in Nice, France. That catapulted him into an obsession with fragrances. He amassed a huge collection and eventually wrote a perfume guide that described their scents in an almost poetic form. Luca became arguably the world鈥檚 first fragrance influencer. That鈥檚 how he met his wife, editor Tania Sanchez. She read his blog and was also a perfume enthusiast.

But Luca鈥檚 interest in smells didn鈥檛 stop at cosmetics. Luca is also intrigued by the biological functions in the nose that allow us to smell. Because no-one fully knows how this works. In the 90s, there was one prevailing theory: that our noses have a way to sense the shapes of molecules and therefore we experience their scent. Luca didn鈥檛 think this theory made sense and then revived an old and unpopular idea: that the nose detects smells through the vibration of molecules. Because of his unorthodox beliefs, Luca has faced opposition in the olfaction community.

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Presented and produced by Saskia Collette

(Photo: Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Credit: Derek Pelling)